Innehållsförteckning för Issue 63 från Cinema Scope

On the closing night of this year’s Images Festival, sisters Velvet and Lady Nite (collectively, 10,000 Horses) took the stage at St. Anne’s Parish Hall to score a trio of Joyce Wieland films with their “electro torch” compositions. The duo’s synths and ukulele transformed the soundtracks for Water Sark (1965) and Solidarity (1973), and intensified the action in Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968), a Vietnam protest film in which gerbils evade their feline overlords to settle amid the delicious, DDT-free grasses of Canada. While these musical interventions were for the most part illuminating, the lyrics of Velvet’s lamenting ballads at times clashed with Wieland’s images. (Why belt the refrain “Born to run!” over a film that, by framing the feet of striking workers and printing the word…

Dennis Lim’s Artforum dispatch from Cannes pauses briefly to ponder the merits of László Nemes’ Son of Saul and concludes that, either despite or because of Nemes’ “showboating” tendencies, it’s a film that will “spawn a thousand think pieces.” If the ruminations that follow will, I’m afraid, constitute one of the first of those think pieces, it’s probably because the prospect of writing a straightforward review of Son of Saul is rather wearying. The tale of a member of a Sonderkommando unit (a corps comprised of Jewish prisoners assigned by the Nazis to dispose of dead bodies at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp) named Saul Auslander, Son of Saul successfully pushed the buttons of several distinct constituencies which regularly cover Cannes. A faction that might be termed the “populist humanists” lauded…

It’s been both amusing and disheartening to watch fellow critics lash out against Argentine-born “French extremist” Gaspar Noé’s new movie, a 3D porno un-ironically titled Love, for failing to achieve such “good movie” goals as “acting excellence,” “believable chemistry,” or “naturalistic dialogue.” Admittedly, Love’s execution of these basic tenets of narrative filmmaking is shoddy in comparison to other recent attempts to introduce frank sexuality into uppermiddlebrow markets, such as Nymphomaniac (2013) and L’inconnu du lac (2013). Then again, Love isn’t really aspiring to narrative-movie objectives. By this I don’t mean there isn’t a plot; there is, and it’s indeed a very Noé-esque one, backtracking through a relationship’s trajectory in order to rediscover a blissful origin. But the way that Love works with time isn’t horizontal as in traditional narrative cinema;…

“Fiction captures the truth, and at the same time, what it conceals.” —Marcel Broodthaers “All the World’s Futures” is a pretty grim supposition, if not a dismal, somewhat dizzying “iterative choreography,” to quote this year’s Venice Biennale curator Okwui Enwezor. Those futures are in fact meant to be a barometer of the present, with evidence of the current tumult reverberating around the globe, in some cases, the symptomatic, cyclical manifestation of post-colonial mess and melancholia. It’s no big secret that the world is in a state of disorder (as it has been before, and worse, say between 1938-45 or during successive genocides), and shall be in those plural future tenses—future proche, simple, antérieur, et conditionnel—with a diversity of experience ripe for the dissemination of societal trauma and states of emergency.…

“It’s crazy that you haven’t changed,” the once-roaming, now grounded American writer Julia (Greta Gerwig) tells ex-boyfriend Paul (Félix de Givry) in an uneasy reunion partway through Mia Hansen-Love’s Eden. The most obstinately static Bildungsroman since Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995), Eden occupies a curious space in Hansen-Love’s oeuvre about young people possessed of sharp aesthetic palates and not-quite-sorefined emotional sensibilities. In Tout est pardonné (2007) and Un amour de jeunesse (2011), Hansen-Love charted the identity formation of her beautiful French urbanites by juxtaposing a pair of discrete moments in their lives (neatly rendered in the films’ bifurcated structures), taking them to the end of their adolescent larval states and picking up with them years later, not yet complete but more solidly themselves. As Julia’s less-than-generous characterization of…

Cinema Scope: Miguel Gomes, you need no introduction to the readers of this magazine. Here you are back in Cannes with a three-part, six-hour epic inspired by the Arabian Nights. There’s general consensus among critics that it’s one of the best things here, but some people seem concerned that in today’s distribution landscape, it will be difficult to get the film seen widely, certainly not as widely as Tabu (2012). Are you losing sleep over this? Miguel Gomes: It’s Arabian Nights, it’s commercial! Scope: After watching all three volumes over the past week, it works as one movie for me, albeit one I’m glad I didn’t watch over six hours straight. Gomes: It’s one and it’s three. You know about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? This is…

“This isn’t an ordinary movie or a dismembered television program. It is a movie! M-O-V-I-E! It was designed for a movie theatre, with a full audience in attendance. If it is projected in a theatre it’ll tear the guts right out of the audience and spill them in the aisles. —Charles Willeford, The Woman Chaser Where is the cinema of Charles Willeford? There’s Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter (1974), George Armitage’s Miami Blues (1990), and Robinson Devor’s The Woman Chaser (1999)—the latter two newly reissued via streaming services and Shout! Factory Blu-ray—but this hardly seems enough for an author with dozens of crackerjack books to his name. (Compare that meagre handful to the copious cinematizations of the works of prolific Gallic pulpmeister Jean-Patrick Manchette, as surveyed by Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope…

In the decade spanning 1975 to 1985, visual artist Joseph Bernard completed more than 100 films in Super 8mm. Frustrated by a lack of funds, materials, and attention, he withdrew from filmmaking and, ultimately, public art production entirely, though he remained on the faculty at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, retiring in 2007 as Professor Emeritus. American experimental cinema is considerably poorer for both the brevity and obscurity of his career. Happily, the latter of these issues might now be rectified thanks to the Blu-ray release of Prismatic Music, a collection of 40 of Bernard’s films. Eight years ago, B. Kite wrote in these pages of the rediscovery of Jacques Rivette’s cinema as “a submerged continent [rising] suddenly to the surface”; Bernard’s work may not comprise a continent—its concerns are…

“To support Italian cinema is a crime against humanity.” —Franco Maresco Even more provincial and mediocre than the three Italian films in the Cannes Competition was the reaction of the mainstream media in Italy when they woke up to what they perceived and reported to be an unforgivable affront. None of their three contenders won a prize. National mourning was semi-officially declared, for a few hours that is: film critics, cultural pundits, and experts on all matters flocked to the delirious tribunes of radio, television, and newspapers to air their outrage. Needless to say, most of them weren’t even in Cannes, which means they hadn’t watched the other films in competition. But that’s not a requirement in order to take part in the cultural debate in Italy: the louder and…

Didway into Cemetery of Splendour, Jenjira Pongpas visits the Shrine of the Two Goddesses with her American husband to make offerings: she gives the goddesses a cheetah figurine for blessings on her bad leg, a gibbon for her strong limbs, and a tiger for the strength of her new son, Itt, one of the soldiers infected by the plague of eternal somnolence whom Jenjira helps take care of. “We have a new son?” her husband inquires. “Yeah, he’s a good man. He serves the nation,” she says. “You’re a foreigner, you won’t get it, honey.” There were chuckles in Cannes’ Salle Debussy when Jenjira delivered that punch line. Foreigners won’t get it? They do, honey, apparently big-time (well, except for Thierry Frémaux and the Un Certain Regard jury). In Apichatpong…

Sex seems the inevitable returning controversy du jour at the Festival de Cannes, every couple years another auteur revealing some supposedly new transgression set to scandalize an international press corps wholly ignorant that, outside their bubble, there exists a body of truly vulgar and pornographic work and surrounding discourse that reveal such audacities as The Brown Bunny (2003) or La vie d’Adèle (2013) and their incensed critics as positively genteel. If you follow the main word of mouth out of Cannes this year, you would be forgiven for thinking that Gaspar Noé’s Love, a 3D relationship drama structured around unsimulated sex scenes between his actors, was the sex film of the festival. But you’d be wrong. Away from the red carpet, over at the Quinzaine, Austrian celluloid mix-master Peter Tscherkassky…

At one point in his new film The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzmán visits a friend’s painting studio and asks the artist to unroll one of her current projects: an immense, to-scale cutout model of Chile. The country is so long and narrow, Guzmán recalls, that it could never fit on a single poster in his elementary-school geography classes. As Guzmán examines the length of his country’s shoreline, his recollections move from the whimsical to the grim: it was a habit of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship to drop its victims into the sea from helicopters, so a longer shore means a larger repository for the unclaimed dead. (Later in the film, Guzmán enlists a journalist and a writer to stage one such burial, binding a dummy to the heavy rails that…

Behold TIFF’s list of Canada’s All-Time Top Ten, a quasidecennial poll (previously conducted in 1984, 1993, and 2004) in the Sight & Sound mould culled from ballots cast by some 200 voters. These include, but are not limited to, festival programmers, filmmakers, producers, critics, bloggers, and Tweeters (including several writers for this magazine). I’ll hold off doing a film-by-film rundown of the top ten, because notes are available on TIFF’s website (along with a schedule for the free screening series in Toronto this summer that accompanies the poll) and because I’m not sure what exactly I can say about Mon oncle Antoine or Les Ordres that hasn’t already been said, aside from the fact that in my opinion they are indeed pretty great (the best movies on the list). As…

Well, at least the weather was good. Every year another leak threatens to spring in the dam, but the Festival de Cannes is not going to die a death of a thousand, or even a million, cracks. I started to vomit up the Kool-Aid at least a decade ago, and harbour no illusions that the tide will roll in the direction of us arty-farty zealots, because, friends, the system is surely rigged. To draw a timely analogy, one might say that Cannes, with its national competition painfully unfolding over an extended duration, is the World Cup of festival cinema, and well-known Olympique Lyonnais supporter Thierry Frémaux might as well be its Sepp Blatter. Which is not to say that there are millions in bribes criss-crossing international borders from sales agents…

The sounds of silence reverberate loudest in The Assassin, Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first feature in eight years. The film’s opening image, of a donkey quietly grazing in a field, immediately suggests an acute awareness of natural ambience. This impression manifests itself as the most frequently felt resonance in a work largely built around aesthetic absences and abstractions. A simmering, sumptuous ninth-century-set wuxia inspired by a popular work of Tang Dynasty chuanqi literature, The Assassin finds Hou returning to the historical drama after a prolonged, post-millennial period of more contemporary cultural and romantic concerns, as well as to matters concerning China’s distant past following the fin-de-siècle fever dream of The Assassin’s most direct stylistic and thematic corollary, Flowers of Shanghai (1998). Despite its generally serene demeanour, The Assassin is intently…

Almost 90 per cent of Canada is uninhabitable. Of those who live in the rest, the overwhelming majority live within 500 miles of the US border. So maybe it’s not so surprising that the nation’s filmmakers—themselves largely clustered in the same few square miles of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal—regard the hinterlands with so much fear and mistrust. Sure, those placid lakes, verdant forests, and dramatic mountain ranges may look pretty in the commercials made to lure wealthy Asian tourists. But stories about forays into the bush tend to turn out about as well as a camping trip in a Margaret Atwood novel—in other words, with a bedraggled, half-feral traveller trying to fend off a gang of marmosets while armed only with a tree branch. Such anxieties have inevitably encouraged a…

“Who’d have thought 20 years ago that people would one day be nostalgic for the apocalypse?” Australian director-writer-producer George Miller mused before the release of the fourth installment of his most famous creation, which barrelled into theatres under the name Mad Max: Fury Road, showing out of competition in Cannes at the same time as almost everywhere else—the first A-list festival slot for one of the great popular filmmakers of his generation. The joke about this telling Miller quote fits well with the numerous ironies evoked by the postmodern clash of retro-futuristic bricolage characterizing the post-apocalyptic landscape and its crazily outfitted, if not outright crazy, inhabitants inevitably associated with the Mad Max universe. In an August 1999 BBC interview Miller still envisioned Mel Gibson reprising the role that launched his…

One of the most extraordinary American experimental filmmakers of the 20th century, Gregory Markopoulos (1928-1992) also remains one of its most elusive. For more than a decade before his death, Markopoulos— who had emigrated to Europe in 1967, withdrawn his films from circulation, and asked that a chapter on his work be removed from P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film—had been disassembling many of his most celebrated films and reworking them, along with some 55 previously unscreened new films, into a final magnum opus, Eniaios, a silent, 80-hour-long epic arranged in 22 cycles. Left unprinted when Markopoulos died, Eniaios (a term evoking unity and oneness, yet a film in which, separated always by lengths of leader, no two images “touch”) is still today being slowly processed and projected for the faithful…